1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of online job application and more particularly to a system, method and apparatus for submitting a résumé to job websites.
2. Description of the Related Art
Finding a job has progressed from word-of-mouth to newspaper want-ads to modern online services. The likes of Hotjobs.com and CareerBuilder.com have web sites containing millions of job posts. Furthermore, profession-specific sites such as careers.findlaw.com, jtpos.com have many more job postings specific to a particular industry or profession such as law. Even more geographically restricted sites such as orlandosentinel.com, Miami.com and latimes.com have job postings restricted to a certain geographic area (Orlando or Miami, Fla. and Los Angeles, Calif.). Add to that a plethora of corporate web sites such as att.com/hr (AT&T), dell.jobs.com (Dell) and 3m.com/careers (3M).
Each web site has its own collection of job postings, its own way of enabling the job seeker find the job they are looking for, its own format for displaying results and its own method/format for importing a résumé from the job seeker. Furthermore, many of these web sites require the job seeker have an account along with a username and password. In general, tens-of-thousands of new jobs are added, expired or modified every week; requiring the job seeker to periodically log onto all potential career site (remembering their logon credentials) and searching for their desired job using the tools specific to that web site.
Adding to the difficulty in finding a job is the variability of job application processes at each of the different career sites. Each site has its own set of pages the job seeker must maneuver to find, then to apply for a job. Each career site requires the job seeker to register and have a username and password for authentication. Each career site has a different set of data required for applying. Some career sites let the job seeker upload a résumé from a file and some require the job seeker to re-enter much of the information already contained in the job seekers résumé. All of which frustrates the job seeker.
Frustration and lost opportunities are caused by the job seeker having to remember user names and passwords from several different career sites; following the flow of different résumé capturing processes; and having to reenter details from their past experiences into data entry screens of the various career sites. Often, errors occur. The job seeker enters the date they started a job ten years ago as six years ago and the employer never calls—thinking there was a four-year gap in employment. Similarly, the job seeker enters 3 years of experience instead of 30 and an automatic screening program at the job website never delivers their résumé to a human relations person.
Often, a job seeker is without work and anxious to be reemployed. They apply for many positions per day or per week, hoping to find a good job. Because of the huge number of job postings hosted on the World Wide Web, it takes many hours to visit each career site, search for relevant jobs, sift through the “hits,” then, add to that, added time to fill out a job application, repeating the same information that is often on the job seeker's résumé. Case in point, a patent attorney looking for a job may look at web sites specific to law such as IPLAW and AIPLA. This is not sufficient; the patent attorney may desire a corporate position and needs to visit many different corporate web sites such as AT&T, Lucent, HP, etc. This is still not enough. The patent attorney needs to visit many different general career websites such as Hotjobs.com and CareerBuilder.com. Often, the different career sites have different username and password restrictions or their favorite user name has already been taken. Therefore, they have several different login credentials, needing to keep track of such for each website. Furthermore, much time is wasted logging into and out of the myriad of career websites. To find a job quickly, the patent attorney visits all of the career sites every day to see if any new job postings were made the day prior, having to log in. Then, finding a new job posting, the patent attorney must fill out the requisite application and track their application so they don't apply for the same position twice and so they can schedule follow-up letters or phone calls. It is conceivable that, for some positions like patent attorney, engineer and management, a job seeker will have many active applications, perhaps over 200. Any improvement to the disparate collection of career sites will help the job seeker quickly find an open position, leading to a more efficiently employed population.
What is needed is a system that will capture a job seeker's résumé data, create shadow accounts on one or more career web sites and upload the résumé data to the one or more career web sites.